As the very long final season of The Walking Dead hits its first intermission, its latest spinoff has officially been brought to life. AMC just greenlit the previously announced Tales From the Walking Dead anthology series and set it for debut in 2022. The company also set Channing Powell, a writer and producer who has worked on both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, as the show runner. He’ll work alongside Scott M. Gimple, who oversees all things Walking Dead.
“I started as a fan of The Walking Dead and have ended up as a showrunner of what will hopefully be one of its most unique spin-offs,” Powell said in a statement. “That’s nuts and I’m so grateful to AMC and Scott for supporting me and my writers while we pushed, pulled, and poked at the boundaries of this universe to bring you something new and unexpected, while hopefully still tending to what core audiences loved so much about the flagship show.”
The first season will be six episodes that “focus on both new and established characters set in the world of the original series.” That’s a slightly more streamlined description than the one released last year which described Tales as “an episodic anthology with individual episodes or arcs of episodes focused on new or existing characters, backstories, or other stand-alone experiences.”
“This series, more than any other in the Walking Dead universe, runs on new voices, perspectives, and ideas — bringing to life stories unlike any we’ve told before,” Gimple said. “I’m thrilled to be Channing’s consigliere, helping in every way I can to make those new visions real for the best fans in TV.” For fans, all of this is very exciting. The Walking Dead is a huge universe and now characters we hated to see go too soon could come back, plot holes and questions we had could be answered, really anything is possible.
“We see so much potential for a wide range of rich and compelling storytelling in this world, and the episodic anthology format of Tales of the Walking Dead will give us the flexibility to entertain existing fans and also offer an entry point for new viewers, especially on streaming platforms,” Dan McDermott, the president of original programming for AMC Networks and AMC Studios, said. “We have seen the appeal of this format in television classics like The Twilight Zone and, more recently, Black Mirror, and are excited to engage fans in this new way, against the backdrop of this very unique and engrossing world.”
Now, the comparison there between The Walking Dead and Twilight Zone or Black Mirror is more about the episodic formats, not the nature of the shows. But, the anthology nature of Tales does hypothetically open that possibility up. It’s a tantalising thought and we’ll see how it plays out in 2022. Here’s a look at the art.
